Transcript The Holocaust - El Dorado High School

The Holocaust
Chapter 16 Section 3
The Holocaust Begins
As part of the Nazi vision of Europe, the Germanic
people considered Aryan were considered the “master
race.” Everyone else, mainly Jewish people, were
considered inferior.
This racist message would eventually lead to the mass
slaughter, known as the Holocaust, of Jews and other
groups deemed inferior by the Nazis.
The Nazis knowingly tapped into a hatred for Jews that
had deep roots in European history. However, they
misused the term Aryan which correctly refers to the
Indo-European peoples who began to migrate into the
Indian subcontinent around 1500 B.C.)
Anti -Semitism
This is the term given to
political, social and
economic agitation against
Jews. In simple terms it
means ‘Hatred of Jews’.
Aryan Race
This was the name of what Hitler
believed was the perfect race. These
were people with full German blood,
blonde hair and blue eyes.
In time, Nazis made the targeting of Jews a government policy.
• Some Germans blamed Jews for the Germans
loss of WWI and for their economic hardships.
• The Nuremberg Laws, passed in 1935, deprived Jews
of their rights to German citizenship and
forbade marriages between Jews and nonJews.
• Laws passed later also limited the kind of work
that the Jews could do.
Why blame the Jews?
Christian Europe had a long history of antiJewish violence, starting during the Middle
Ages and stemming from a twisted belief
that blamed the death of Jesus on the
Jews, not the Romans.
Kristallnacht
Aka The Night of Broken Glass
November 1938, a 17 year-old Jewish youth
(Herschel Grynszpan) from Germany, while
visiting his uncle in Paris, received a post card
that said his father who had lived in Germany
for 27 years was being deported to Poland.
On November 7, to avenge his father, the boy
shot a German diplomat living in Paris.
On November 9, Nazi storm troopers attacked Jewish
homes, businesses, and synagogues across
Germany murdering about 100 Jews.
November 9 became known as Kristallnacht or
“Night of Broken Glass.”
This night marked a huge step in the Nazi policy
of Jewish persecution.
After Kristallnacht, some Jews realized that violence
against them was bound to increase. By the
end of 1939, a number of German Jews fled to
other countries.
At first, Hitler favored emigration as a solution to
what he referred to as the “Jewish problem.”
After admitting tens of thousands of Jewish
refugees many countries such as France,
Britain, and the United States closed their doors to
further immigration.
What is shocking about the Holocaust is that all of
the rest of the world made little attempt to save
the Jewish people from being exterminated.
The major Catholic and Protestant Church leaders
across the world were silent as the Nazis began
their killing.
The United States even refused to allow a large
passenger ship full of hundreds of Jewish
refugees to enter the U.S. and turned it back to
Germany.
A few brave individuals from many nationalities:
Germans, Danes, Dutch, and French, quietly hid
Jewish children and friends from the Nazis.
One of the few countries to openly accept Jewish
refugees throughout the war was the Muslim One
of the few countries to openly accept Jewish
refugees throughout the war was the Muslim
country of Turkey (which also had accepted
Jewish refugees fleeing the Christians in Spain
in 1492).
The state of Israel in 1947, after WWII, was set
up as a reaction to the Nazi Holocaust so that the
Jewish people could set up their own
homeland.
When emigration did not get rid of the Jews,
Hitler ordered all countries under his control to
move all Jews to designated cities.
In those cities, the Nazis herded the Jews into
dismal, overcrowded ghettos, or segregated
Jewish areas.
Ghettos were sealed off with barbed wire or stone
walls.
The hope was that the Jews would starve to death
or die from disease.
After 1941, all Jews in German controlled areas
had to wear a yellow star of David patch.
In the Ghettos
Jews hung on in the ghettos:
Organized resistance groups
Struggled to keep traditions
Produced plays and concerts
Teachers taught lesson in secret schools
Scholars kept records in hopes that people would
find out the truth.
The Final Solution
• Hitler grew impatient waiting for Jews to die
from disease an starvation so he decided
implement his plan called the “Final Solution.”
• His plan was actually a program of genocide, the
systematic killing of an entire people.
• Hitler believed that the plan of conquest
depended on the purity of the Aryan race which
meant to protect racial purity meant eliminating
other races, nationalities, or groups they felt
were “sub-human.”
Who were these inferior or sub-human people?
Jews, gypsies, Poles, Russians, homosexuals,
sympathetic Germans, the insane, the disabled,
and the incurably ill. However, the main focus
was on the Jews.
Units from the SS (Hitler’s elite security), moved
from town to town to hunt down Jews. Men,
women, children and even babies were
rounded up and taken to isolated spots.
They would then shoot their prisoners in pits that
became the prisoners’ graves.
Between 1939 and 1945
six million Jews were
murdered, along with
hundreds of thousands of
others, such as Gypsies,
Jehovah’s Witnesses,
disabled and the
mentally ill.
Those that were not reached by the killing squads
were taken to concentration camps or slavelabor camps in Germany and Poland. Hitler
hoped here, prisoners would die more quickly.
The prisoners worked seven days as week as
slaves for the SS or the German business.
Prisoners were beaten or killed for not working
fast enough.
Meals consisted of soup, bread scraps, and
potato peelings. This diet resulted in the loss of
about 50 pounds for many in the first few
months.
The Final Stage
The “Final Solution” reached its final stage in 1942.
Nazis built extermination camps with gas chambers that
could kill as many as 6,000 human beings in a day.
Auschwitz, the largest of the extermination camps
Here, prisoners would parade in front of a committee of
SS doctors. The doctors would separate the strong
(mainly men) from the weak (mostly women, children,
and the elderly, and the sick)
Those labeled sick would be killed that day.
Those that were sick were told to strip down and led to
“shower chamber” with fake shower head. Only once
the doors closed, cyanide gas poured out the
showerheads.
All were killed in a matter of minutes.
Later, the Nazis built crematoriums or ovens
to burn the bodies.
Percentage of Jews killed in each country
A MAP OF THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS AND DEATH CAMPS
USED BY THE NAZIS.
16 of the 44 children
taken from a French
children’s home.
They were sent to a
concentration camp
and later to Auschwitz.
ONLY 1 SURVIVED
A group of
children at a
concentration
camp in Poland.
Part of a stockpile of Zyklon-B poison
gas pellets found at Majdanek death
camp.
Before poison gas was used ,
Jews were gassed in mobile gas
vans. Carbon monoxide gas
from the engine’s exhaust was
fed into the sealed rear
compartment. Victims were
dead by the time they reached
the burial site.
Smoke rises as the
bodies are burnt.
Portrait of two-year-old
Mania Halef, a Jewish
child who was among the
33,771 persons shot by
the SS during the mass
executions at Babi Yar,
September, 1941.
Nazis sift through a huge pile of clothes left
by victims of the massacre.
Two year old Mani Halef’s clothes are somewhere
amongst these.
Bales of hair shaven
from women at
Auschwitz, used to
make felt-yarn.
After liberation, an Allied
soldier displays a stash of
gold wedding rings taken
from victims at Buchenwald.
In 1943, when the number of murdered Jews exceeded 1 million. Nazis
ordered the bodies of those buried to be dug up and burned to destroy all
traces.
Soviet POWs at forced labor in 1943 exhuming bodies in the ravine at
Babi Yar, where the Nazis had murdered over 33,000 Jews in September
of 1941.
Did anyone try and help?
Of course, with the help of non-Jewish people,
and at great risk to themselves, rescuers hid
Jews in their homes or helped them escape to
neutral countries.
How was it that Anne Frank’s Diary Survived WWII?
Anne Frank, a young German-Jewish girl, wrote a diary
which captured 26 months of hiding from German
authorities in Amsterdam during WWII.
Her notebooks and papers had been left behind by the
secret police in the Frank’s family hiding place. Two
Dutch women who had helped the fugitives survive,
gave the papers to Anne’s father, Otto Frank when he
returned from Auschwitz.
Anne had caught typhoid fever in Bergen-Belsen and
died 2 months before German surrender. Of the eight
who hid with Anne, only her father survived.